The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel, pronounced [diː ˈblɛçˌtʁɔml̩] ⓘ) is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass, the first book of his Danzig Trilogy.

Born in 1924 in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), with an adult's capacity for thought and perception, he decides never to grow up when he hears his father declare that he would become a grocer.

Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "clairaudient infants", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself".

But when his second love, the diminutive Roswitha, is killed by Allied troops in the invasion of Normandy, Oskar returns to his family in Danzig where he becomes the leader of a criminal youth gang (akin to the Edelweiss Pirates).

The Red Army soon captures Danzig, and Alfred is shot by invading troops after he goes into seizures while swallowing his party pin to avoid being revealed as a Nazi.

Oskar bears some culpability for both of his presumptive fathers' deaths since he leads Jan Bronski to the Polish Post Office in an effort to get his drum repaired and he returns Alfred Matzerath's Nazi party pin while he is being interrogated by Soviet soldiers.

After the war Oskar, his widowed stepmother, and their son have to leave the now Polish city of Danzig and move to Düsseldorf, where he models in the nude and works engraving tombstones.

The ensuing events lead Klepp, Oskar, and Scholle, a guitarist, to form the Rhine River Three jazz band.

As an unreliable narrator, he may contradict himself within his autobiography, as with his varying accounts of, but not exclusively, the Defense of the Polish Post Office, his grandfather Koljaiczek's fate, his paternal status over Kurt, Maria's son, and many others.

[citation needed] However, by 1965 sentiment had cemented into public acceptance, and it soon became recognized as a classic of post-World War II literature, both in Germany and around the world.